Solutions for the Business

I have run into this at a few clients over the past few weeks, so I decided to add it to my blog so I can reference it in the future. In a nut shell, we are looking for a way to build a simple FAQ list that users can reference as needed. For my clients this has ranged from an HR FAQ list to a simple SharePoint FAQ list. We want users to be able to filter the FAQs by category or view the entire list at once.

This approach is definitely nothing super fancy, but in most cases it will get the job done  to get started, you will need to create two lists:

Categories

FAQ List

Custom List

Add an entry for each category you want to use to group the FAQs

Custom List

Add Column: Answer – Multiple Text

Add Column: Category – Lookup to Categories

Once you have the two list populated you can add the web parts to an existing page or create a new page for the FAQs. The screenshot below is an example of a web part page. On the page you will need to add three web parts:

1. Content Editor Web Part: You can use this to add a link that reloads the page with no filter.
2. FAQs Web Part
3. Categories Web Part

Once you have the web parts loaded you can configure the web part connections so that when a categories option is selected, only those FAQs are displayed.

Here is the page in edit mode.

Overall, this is a pretty quick simple out of the box solution. You want to be careful also that this approach can scale to meet your needs. If you know that you will have 20 different categories, then this option is probably not going to work for your specific need. You may also decide that you don’t like the radio buttons or the fact that the category is displayed in both web parts. In that case you would need to modify the web parts using SharePoint Designer and Data View Web Parts.

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This site has been created to help you find all things SharePoint from the perspective of the business. This means simple instructions for building no-code solutions that bring real value to the organization. The tools discussed on the site include all things Office - which simply means Office, Lync, SharePoint, Yammer and more!

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Learn more about the company I work for and about some specific products I have been working on.